turn for his help. It was then that Austria first put
her finger into the Italian _pasticcio_, where she kept it so many
centuries. But the Austrian governor whom the Duke set over the
Veronese made himself intolerable,--the Austrian governor always
does,--and they drove him out of the city. On this the Duke turns
about, unites with Boniface, takes Verona and sacks it.

An altogether pleasanter incident of Boniface's domination was the
miraculous discovery of the sacred relics, buried and lost during the
sack of Mantua by the Hungarians. The place of sepulture was revealed
thrice to a blind pauper in a dream. People dug where he bade them
and found the relics. Immediately on its exhumation the Blood wrought
innumerable miracles; and the fame of it grew so great, that the Pope
came to see it, attended by such concourse of the people that they
were obliged to sleep in the streets. It was an age that drew the
mantle of exterior devotion and laborious penances and pilgrimages
over the most hideous crimes and unnatural sins. But perhaps the poor
believers who slept in the streets of Mantua on that occasion were
none the worse for their faith when the Pope pronounced the Blood
genuine and blessed it. I am sure that for some days of enthusiasm
they abstained from the violence of war, and paused a little in that
career of vice and wickedness of which one reads in Italian history,
with the full conviction that Sodom and Gomorrah also were facts, and
not merely allegory. I have no doubt that the blind beggar believed
that Heaven had revealed to him the place where the Blood was buried,
that the Pope believed in the verity of the relic, and that the devout
multitudes were helped and uplifted in their gross faith by this
visible witness to the truth that Christ had died for them upon the
bloody tree. Poor souls! they had much to contend with in the way to
any good. The leaven of the old pleasure-making pagan civilization
was in them yet (it is in the Italians to this day); and centuries
of Northern invasion had made them fierce and cruel, without teaching
them Northern virtues. Nay, I question much if their invaders had so
many rugged virtues to teach as some people would have us think. They
seem to have liked well the sweet corruptions of the land, and the
studied debaucheries of ages of sin, and to have enjoyed them as
furiously and clumsily as bears do the hoarded honey of civilized
bees.

After the death of Boniface the lords